Donald Trump’s Raw Emotion

The study of human emotions cautions us to parse our feelings carefully.

November 2, 2016

There isn’t a word in English to describe the special kind
of sadness that descends when a visitor leaves. It’s both a sense of relief
(you get your space back!) but also an awareness that your guest has left an
emptiness behind. In the language of the Baining people, a tribe in Papua New
Guinea, the emotion is called awumbuk. The Baining think that visitors, in
order to “travel light,” leave a layer of themselves behind, which hangs like a
heavy mist over their hosts. The only way to dispel the mist, which can linger
for days, is to set out a bowl of water overnight. The water will absorb the
sad air and can be tossed out the next morning.

THE BOOK OF HUMAN EMOTIONS: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FEELING FROM ANGER TO WANDERLUST by Tiffany Watt SmithProfile Books, 208 pp., $28.33

In The Book of Human Emotions, a
collection of alphabetically-arranged mini-essays, Tiffany Watt Smith, a
cultural historian at the Centre for the History of
Emotions in London, has collected words like this from all over the world.
It’s largely a playful and lighthearted book, but Smith’s underlying goal is
radical: “If our emotions are so important to us today, if they are measured by
governments, subject to increasing pharmaceutical intervention by doctors,
taught in our schools and monitored by our employers, then we had better
understand where the assumptions we have about them come from.” Smith thinks
that examining the language of emotions holds the key to understanding emotion
itself, leaving us better able to resist the attempts of governments and
companies to manipulate us. These concerns couldn’t be more well-timed, and
it’s all because of a word that isn’t in Smith’s book, but which inspires in
nearly everyone the strongest of emotions—fear, pain, anger, hope, disbelief,
and disgust—and which may be the single most emotional word of this year:
Trump.

Trump has brought emotion to the election more than perhaps
any previous candidate, even including Obama, the candidate of hope. There is the
startling euphoria among supporters at his rallies, and the unique feeling
of terror
and depression he sparks in liberals (and even
many conservatives). Yet the reason that Trump should be considered as
fundamentally an emotional phenomenon is not because of the different reactions
that he inspires but because he doesn’t distinguish between different emotions
at all. Trump doesn’t recognize the differences between his subjective feelings
(“Nobody
has more respect for women” than he does, he claims) and objective facts
(he has a trail of accusations and allegations of sexual
assault and discrimination). It turns out you can build a whole
presidential campaign on blurred emotions.

It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that the
concept of—and word for—“emotion” came into use. Before then, we spoke of love,
hate, or jealousy, for instance, as types of “passions” or “appetites” or
“humors.” Each of these words implied forces that act upon us—arising from
either the supernatural world or from our own bodies. In 1820, the Scottish
philosopher Thomas Brown suggested that a new, more precise language was needed
for the category of experiences and mental states. In lectures Brown gave in
Edinburgh, he repurposed a French word, émotion,
which had previously been used to describe the movement of physical bodies.
Emotional states could be seen—for instance, in wide eyes and trembling hands,
reflexes that showed how the brain was processing stimuli.

Charles Darwin, early in his career, also began to study how
emotions were expressed. “The language of the emotions, as it has sometimes
been called, is certainly of importance for the welfare of mankind,” he later wrote in
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872). In order to understand that language, Darwin sent questionnaires to
missionaries and explorers, asking them how the people they met expressed fear
and excitement. He conjectured that emotions are not “fixed responses, but the
result of millions of years of evolutionary processes that were still
ongoing…our emotions were there because they had helped us survive.” Emotions,
in short, were nothing less than inherited reflexes.

“The language of the emotions,” Darwin wrote, “is certainly of importance for the welfare of mankind.”

At the end of the century, Freud began developing a theory
of emotions that ran directly counter to Darwin’s purely biological one and
explained them as arising, as Smith summarizes, from the “elusive and complex
influence of the mind, or psyche.” Seeing emotions as not just evolved responses
gave them new dimensions: Now they could be repressed, parasitic, hidden,
forgotten, and transformed. Darwin and Freud, Smith points out, “are
responsible for two of the most influential ideas about our feelings today:
that our emotions are evolved physical responses, and that they are affected by
the play of our unconscious minds.”

Perhaps the most influential modern thinking about emotion
is the so-called universal emotions theory, a loose set of ideas developed
across decades by various anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists. In
the 1960s and 70s, the psychologists Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard argued for
the existence of a small
group of basic emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and
surprise—that all humans both experience and express in the same way,
regardless of cultural or historical context. Smith’s book offers a subtle
corrective to such essentialism, and she is less interested in root causes than
in sheer diversity, hunting worldwide for rare and far-flung emotions, like
some Victorian botanist on the hunt for new species.

To interpret her finds, she draws on what the American
anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the 1970s called “thick
description,”—that is, description that engages with minute historical and
cultural context. “Without context,” Smith says, “you only get a “thin
description” of what is going on, not the whole story—and it’s this whole story
that is what an emotion is.” Han, for instance, is the Korean word
for “a collective acceptance of suffering combined with a quiet yearning for
things to be different.” While understandable in English, han achieves more complex resonance
when considered alongside Korea’s many periods of occupation
by foreign powers, from the Mongols in the thirteenth century to the
Japanese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In her long entry on “disgust,” Smith points out that,
although adherents of universal emotion theory often point to disgust as a
prime example of a basic emotion, there are, in fact, different types of
physical disgust: core disgust (a “repulsion felt when something
poisonous…comes near the mouth”); contamination disgust; and body-envelope
violation disgust (which combines contamination with “an almost existential
horror of the open body”). Smith is interested in how culture determines what
is disgusting. She suspects that “the sense that something is ‘out of place’
might be more important to provoking feelings of disgust than the objectively
dangerous.” In the eighteenth century, people began to use the word disgust for
a growing number of emotions, including not just “physical revulsion,” but also
“moral indignation.” Perceptively Smith writes: “disgust arises more powerfully
when boundaries dissolve, meaning breaks down and things slide ‘out of place,’”
Maybe it’s Trump’s sense that women, whether running against him in the
election or speaking out against his conduct, are “out of place.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, disgust is one of the most
effective words Trump could use to rally support, because, it turns out, how
quickly or easily you feel disgust is a predictor of how you vote. Psychologist
Yoel Inbar studied the correlation
between sensitivity to the emotion of disgust and voting patterns, and
found higher sensitivity linked to more conservative voting. For Trump, the
word disgust is doing double duty: It’s a handy weapon to throw at the almost
numberless things that upset him, and it attracts the many people whose experience
of the world is filtered through strong, but not necessarily well-defined,
emotions.

It’s hard not to look at all this disgust and see fear at
the root of it. The New York Times analyzed
95,000 words from Trump’s speeches, interviews and rallies, and observed a
“pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones,” a tactic also
deployed by politicians like Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. A
conservative political consultant and writer, Reed Galen, characterized
Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention as “a fear-fueled acid
trip designed to encourage older, white, disaffected voters to pull the lever
for a time in America that no longer exists, if it ever did.”

Smith’s definition of fear explains another facet of Trump’s
rhetorical power. Like disgust, fear is often considered a universal emotion.
But, Smith notes, there is a difference between fear of bodily harm and more
abstract fears, like that a loved one might leave you. Trump, however,
conflates all these feelings. He describes the danger of terrorist attacks with
the same fervor as his belief that the media has been unfair to him. According
to the Times’s word analysis, “as much
as he likes the word ‘attack’…he often uses it to portray himself as the victim
of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of
his crowds.” Rationally, these things are different, but by flattening out
distinctions between kinds of emotions, so that a woman breastfeeding is equated
with beheadings by ISIS and the demise of democracy, he maximizes the appeal
that he can make through a single, powerful emotion.

Just as our decisions are influenced by policies, they’re
also influenced by appeals to emotion. Trump has been pounding the drum of fear
loudly for months, and we’re all living in the reverberations. Of course, having
more words for fear wasn’t going to stop Trump’s rise, but it might have given
his opponents more effective ways to respond to him, and given voters a clearer
sense of exactly what politics they are signing up for. Smith’s book shows how
much we rely on, and are bound by, the words our particular culture gives us. Knowing
the limits of what they describe, and the possibilities of other languages,
should give us pause to think about what we really want them to say.